Records show Army discharged Edward Snowden after 5 months

The former CIA computer technician who leaked last week’s explosive details about American classified surveillance programs spent just five months in the Army Reserve before he was discharged, records show.

Edward Snowden, the self-proclaimed whistleblower who sent the information to The Guardian and The Washington Post, joined up in 2004, but separated just five months later, an Army official told POLITICO.

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Who is Edward Snowden?

“His records indicate he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces Recruit (18X) on 7 May 2004 but was discharged 28 September 2004. He did not complete any training or receive any awards,” the spokesman said.

Records show Snowden’s birthday as June 21, 1983. The 18X is a code for an enlistment option that permits recruits to try to go directly into the Army’s Special Forces, a path previously open only to serving soldiers.

“Those were the new generation of SF babies they started to try to get when the war was really going back then,” said Gina Cavallaro, an Army expert and author of the book “Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“They didn’t require college, they were looking for people they could train up quickly … I think it has subsided by now,” Cavallaro said. To go directly into the SF world, she said, “I think you have to be smart. You can’t go into those services and be just your average joe with lots of tattoos and knives. You have to be smart — if you have a language it’s good, plus you have to be physically fit, and there are all these requirements that you have to have.”

But as it turned out, Snowden did not wind up entering the SF world — he told The Guardian that he “broke both his legs in a training accident.” It’s possible he could have injured himself as part of parachute training.

Snowden, who is currently an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said he has been holed up in secret at a Hong Kong hotel since taking medical leave from his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii in late May. Booz Allen said Sunday night that Snowden had been its employee for less than three months.

According to The Guardian, Snowden was raised in North Carolina and suburban Maryland. Though he did not graduate from high school, the paper said he later received a GED.